How Cost Management works
BMC AMI Cost Management
is a tool for analysis, optimization, and planning software license cost of IBM System z Sub-Capacity Charges for Monthly License Charge (MLC) products. It also lets you analyze and optimize your Tailored Fit Pricing (TFP) configurations.
IBM bases sub-capacity pricing on the four-hour rolling average utilization of z/OS LPARs recorded during the period of a month. A monthly period runs from 00:00 on the second day of the month through midnight (24:00) on the first day of the next month.
The unit of measurement for utilization of z/OS LPARs is MSUs or Millions of Service Units used per hour. MSUs are also sometimes called Software MSUs (as opposed to Hardware MSUs) and are calculated as CPU seconds used by general purpose CPs in a z/OS LPAR during an hour multiplied by the Software Service Units coefficient reported by RMF in field SMF70CPA of the type 70 record.
The Software Service Units coefficient determines the MSU rating of an IBM mainframe processor. However, MSU ratings cannot be utilized as a capacity metric since IBM uses MSUs only to gauge software pricing. For this reason, the information provided by Cost Management cannot be used for Capacity Planning or Performance Reporting and should be used only for cost analysis and planning.
For more information about IBM sub-capacity pricing, see the IBM Z software licensing.
For the table containing MSU ratings for IBM mainframe processors see the IBM Z resource links.
As a component of the BMC Cost & Performance Optimization for System z suite, Cost Management:
- Provides reports and interactive displays that clearly indicate where cost savings can be realized by managing and optimizing your LPAR capacities and workloads
- Retrieves specific data from the Capacity Management Web Services server and then dynamically builds it into a cost model that can be processed and analyzed by a variety of tools
- Utilizes the following tools for your cost analysis:
- The MLC Software Contract Reporting tool presents an array of quadrant charts that serve as portals to access comprehensive charting data about your actual and projected spending for the entire duration of your software contract.
- The MLC Monthly Reporting tool provides information about MLC products that exist in your data center environment, and components that impact the overall cost.
- The TFP Monthly Reporting tool provides information about the TFP configurations that you have created to compare costs.
- The MLC Planning tool gives you the ability to investigate the effect of future data center environment changes on the overall cost. It also enables you to analyze potential cost optimization actions.